PowerPoint 2013 Presenter View

Presenter View in PowerPoint 2013 allows you to see your notes on your monitor while your audience sees only the slide. In previous releases of PowerPoint, it was difficult to figure out who saw what on which monitor. The improved Presenter View fixes that problem and makes it simpler to work with.

You may have had problems setting up Presenter View in the past but it’s vastly improved in PowerPoint 2013. Just connect the monitors and PowerPoint automatically sets it up.

If everything is set up correctly, when you click Slide Show (bottom right), or press F5 on the keyboard, Presenter View opens by default.

Presenter View looks like a stylish control panel for presenters. It allows you to see the current slide, complete with Notes, and also a preview of the next slide so you can prepare for it.

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Don’t feel daunted by the controls you see in Presenter View; they are quite straight forward. Let’s go through them now.

Show Taskbar – clicking on this toggles the display of your Windows taskbar, and allows you to swap programs (amongst other things)

Display Settings – gives you the option of swapping the Presenter View with the Slideshow, and also displaying the Slideshow on both your monitor as well as the audience monitor.

End the Slideshow – does what you would expect

Timer Controls – you can see at a glance how long you have been rambling for, and also have controls for pausing and resuming the timer. Note that pause and resume are for the timer, not the presentation.

Next Slide – a thumbnail image gives a preview of what the next slide is in the presentation.

Notes – over on the right you can see any notes that you have added to the current slide.

Slide Navigation – the left arrow leads to the previous slide, and the right arrow leads to the next. PowerPoint also tells you what the current slide is and how many are in the slideshow.

In Slide Controls – provide a variety of tools like pen and laser pointer tools to mark on and point to different elements on a slide.

The laser pointer acts like a cursor that your audience can see so you can draw their attention to certain areas of your slide. With the pen and highlighter tools you can draw on your slide. These are useful for writing additional content and highlighting particular elements of the slide. You can also change the colour of the ink you draw with. The next control allows you to see all slides in your presentation, which is similar to slide sorter view. The next control allows you to zoom in to a portion of the slide. You select which portion, and then, when ready, click the zoom tool again to return to normal view. The next button allows you to black or unblack the slideshow. This control simply changes the screen to all black, and is good for interludes where you want to discuss something without the distraction of the slide. Moving along, the final button displays more slideshow options: hide presenter view returns what the presenter sees to the normal editing window while the audience continues to see the slideshow and the screen options allow you to black out or white out the screen.